Update: Reviews

Things have been pretty quiet on the blogging front, due to life getting 'hectic' for a few months there. Things are levelling out and whilst I don't see myself returning quite to the glory days of 30+ posts a month very often, hopefully there will be an increase in more meaningful content on the blog (i.e. reviews and more substantial articles) soon.


What's in the pipeline:


Books: Books have massively fallen by the wayside in recent months, but I'm getting back on top of reading again. Expect a review of Steles of the Sky (which I started halfway across the Atlantic in April and finished last week on the sofa at home) soon. I'm already a quarter of the way through Joe Abercrombie's Half the World so that should follow relatively soon after. I also want to resume my progress through the Vorkosigan and Wild Cards series, but there'll also be reviews of books by Ian Esslemont, Peter F. Hamilton and Kameron Hurley in the offing as well.

Games: Many weeks of playing Divinity: Original Sin have left me absolutely nowhere near finishing it, and now the equally humongous Wasteland 2 is taking up a lot of my free time. Game reviews will resume once I actually manage to finish something.

TV: Thanks to multiple viewing projects going on at the same time, this is one area I've been making more notable progress. Expect reviews of Community (Season 5), True Detective (Season 1), Veep (Season 2), The Legend of Korra (Season 2) and The Walking Dead (Season 4) soon.

Update on THE WORLD OF ICE AND FIRE update (update)

The World of Ice and Fire - the companion volume to George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire novels co-written by Martin and the admins of the Westeros.org website - has once again had its release date (provisionally) changed.

This time, happily, the book has been brought forwards. Originally mooted for a late 2013 release, the book was dropped back a full year to a late 2014 release. However, George R.R. Martin said at the weekend - and since confirmed by his UK publisher - that the book was now aiming for a Spring 2014 release (possibly to tie in with the start of Season 4 of Game of Thrones). Westeros.org has also issued an update, noting that the release date change is not yet final and a drop-back to late 2014 is still possible, but they are seeing if they can make Spring 2014 work as a new date.

In addition, George has admitted to going somewhat overboard with his plans for the book. Whilst Linda Antonsson and Elio Garcia wrote the bulk of the book, it was always planned for GRRM to write a certain amount of material for it. This plan was originally for about 50,000 words, but he ended up writing - or providing - 250,000 words material and notes. Antonsson and Garcia have condensed and summarised this material for the book, whilst another chunk has been sectioned off to become the stand-alone short story The Princess and the Queen, to be published in the Dangerous Women anthology. Martin's original material has been preserved and GRRM and his publishers are musing using this material for a 'GRRM-arillion' type of book later on. This is a reference to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion, a detailed narrative history of Middle-earth which is more remote and removed than a novel, but not so distant, dry and academic as a bald plot summary. The 'GRRM-arillion' project will not be worked on or released before A Song of Ice and Fire itself is completed.

It appears that Tor.com has gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick and released a seriously misleading article about the book. To clarify their points, The World of Ice and Fire has always - since late 2007 when it was originally announced - been an illustrated companion book focusing on the history of Westeros and Essos. It has never been an A-Z encyclopedia. The focus and format of the book has not changed. It is not now a multi-volume affair, it's what it always was intended to be. The 'GRRM-arillion' project is a totally new and separate idea, not The World of Ice and Fire II: The Wrath of Ran. And yes, the book's official date has dropped back to November 2014, but all parties involved are trying to make Spring 2014 work as the new date.

Donations update

Back on 30 October, I opened the blog up to receiving donations. In the interests of transparency, I can confirm that in the last four months I have received £150 in donations, to help keep the blog ticking over.

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed so far, or will do so in the future.

Meanwhile, a brief update on things:

What I'm Watching: Deadwood Season 2, to be followed by Fringe Season 1.
What I'm Reading: The Daylight War by Peter V. Brett (a review of Master and Fool by J.V. Jones should be posted in the next day or so).
What I'm Playing: Skyrim: Dragonborn and Dragon Age: Origins (nearly done with the former). Also (more intermittently) Final Fantasy XIII.

Update on the WHEEL OF TIME catch-up posts

As some have pointed out, it's been a while since I posted the 'story so far' post for the eleventh Wheel of Time novel, Knife of Dreams. With the fourteenth and final book due for release on 8 January, that leaves me with a week to summarise The Gathering Storm and Towers of Midnight.

Unfortunately, it now looks like this will not happen. A combination of two rapid changes of jobs, constant six-day weeks since mid-November and the requirements of doing these summaries (about 8-9 hours of work, basically requiring a full working day of effort) have left me little chance to work on the project. I've done about 30% of The Gathering Storm so far and might just manage to finish that off before AMoL comes out, but definitely not the complex-to-summarise (due to its convoluted timeline) Towers.

I will complete the project, as I know many people will not get to Memory of Light until it comes out in paperback or ebook (the ebook version has, once again, been ludicrously delayed until several months after the hardcover), but sadly not in time for the release of the hardcover. Apologies for that. In the meantime, I can recommend Encyclopedia WoT's summaries of The Gathering Storm and Towers of Midnight.

My traditional year review/preview posts will be along as normal in the next few days, however.

Update

In the middle of a house move at the moment, which is why updates have been thin on the ground. I'm also starting a new job which may continue to keep things on the quiet side around here for the next few weeks.

Currently Watching: Red Dwarf Season 10 (okay), Chuck Season 5 (entertaining), Merlin Season 5 (rather PG Game of Thrones-esque this year).

Currently Reading: The Middle Kingdom by David Wingrove.

Currently Playing: Dishonored, XCOM: Enemy Unknown.

Five years of the Wertzone

Yesterday the blog turned five years old. Wow, how did that happen? Half a decade ago I started the site on a whim following another poster's suggestion on the Westeros.org forum and it's gotten bigger and led to more interesting opportunities than I ever thought possible. Because of the blog I've met a large number of my favourite authors, got into contact with many more and been able to pursue some paid writing and editing work (more on this next year) which otherwise would not have been possible. All great stuff, made possible because people seem to like reading the blog.

So, that's five years, 1,407 posts, well over 1.6 million site visits (and over 2.5 million page views) and 354 book reviews under my belt. Where from here? Onwards and upwards, hopefully (and definitely a page redesign at some point). Thanks to everyone for stopping by over the years. Sorry for the lack of cake :-)

Update

As you may have noticed, new posts have been much less frequent recently. This is due to me getting a new job, which is great but also demanding in time. So, for the forseeable future, it's likely that my blogging frequency will be reduced compared to what it was before, though I'll try to keep up with the news and reviews as much as possible.

Currently reading: Midnight's Mask by Paul S. Kemp.
Currently watching: Merlin Season 4.
Currently playing: Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Possible blog downtime

My PC's been experiencing some 'machine check exception' errors recently, a rather nasty form of error which suggests something is screwed up in the power supply, motherboard or memory. My attempts to work out what the issue is haven't been too successful so far (ironically I just experienced an outage and reset halfway through writing this post) and the issues seem to be getting worse. Unfortunately I can't afford to replace the PC or get it serviced, so if the computer stops working altogether I'm pretty much screwed. If this happens my computer time will be limited to when I can borrow time on a friend's machine, which may only be for short bursts at the weekend. Particularly frustrating as I have several reviews backed up at the moment, as well as a new series of blogs on the possibilities of a Wheel of Time TV series.

Hopefully I can get this issue sorted, but if there are no more updates for a few days, that's the explanation :-)

One Thousandth Post About One Million Hits

I am informed by Blogger that this is my 1,000th post and, coincidentally, this comes on the day that the blog passes 1,000,000 page views (erm, since I remembered to add a stat-counter which was some way into the lifetime of the blog so it's a lot more than that but still). So this as good a time as any to say:

THANKS!!!

And, indeed:


That's pretty much it. Normal blogging will resume shortly :-)

Update

Against my better judgement I joined Twitter a couple of months ago. You can follow me there, if that sort of thing is your wont, although my Tweeting frequency is highly variable.

Kvothe after he'd pulled off the 'Great Glamdring Heist'.

This weekend is the San Diego Comic-Con, which means potentially major TV and movie announcements but relatively little on the book front. That said, Brandon Sanderson, Patrick Rothfuss and, erm, Christopher Paolini are on a panel together, which should be interesting. Apparently very, very early and tentative chunks of The Wise Man's Fear have been sent out to very select editors and authors for feedback (Sanderson says it's great), which is unusual, given that the final book hasn't been turned in yet.

In other news, George R.R. Martin has brutally murdered Pat from Pat's Fantasy Hotlist, which I'm sure has made him very happy. I'm betting for "Splattered under rampaging mammoth," as the causal event.

The countdown to StarCraft II continues. io9 has a reasonably brief summary of the story so far. The game launches in less than one week.

Currently reading: Canticle by Ken Scholes.
Currently watching: The IT Crowd (Season 4).
Currently playing: Alien Swam, Overlord.

2010 review stats so far

Following some interesting observations on Twitter, I did some stat-checking of my reviews this year based around how many books I have have reviewed from what publishers. The list turned out as:

Gollancz/Orion: 7
HarperCollins Voyager: 5
Orbit UK: 5
Pan Macmillan/Tor UK: 3
Black Library: 3
Panther: 1
Tor USA: 1
David Fickling Books: 1
Quercus: 1
Penguin: 1

So that's 28 in total, 13 of which are 2010 releases. The conclusion I'm drawing so far is that 2010 is the best year for SF&F releases in some considerable time, and we're not even halfway through it yet.

Next up on the to-read pile: Helliconia Summer by Brian W. Aldiss, to be followed by City of Ruins by Mark Newton, Helliconia Winter and The Dervish House by Ian McDonald.

Cover art and update

This is the UK cover for Tad Williams' Shadowheart, the concluding volume of the Shadowmarch quartet, due in November (courtesy of Jussi at Westeros):


Nice.

Reading: Helliconia Spring by Brian W. Aldiss.
Reading Pile: I have Helliconia Summer and Winter by the same author standing by, along with City of Ruins by Mark Newton, The Dervish House by Ian McDonald and The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi as high prority reads.
Watching: Ashes to Ashes Season 3 and Lost Season 6.
Playing: Actually, nothing at the moment.

The Current Reading Pile

It was only a year ago that I never let the reading pile get beyond 20 books or so. At the moment it's 71 (all these here plus three more I couldn't find at the time).


Three of these are planned re-reads - the Helliconia Trilogy in the far right pile - and I have a load more planned (such as the first six Malazan books and Jack Vance's Lyonesse Trilogy). Plus I can't read Blood of the Mantis or Salute the Dark until I get the first two books in the series. And there's a bunch of books coming soon that would supplant any of these (Mark Newton's City of Ruins and Chris Wooding's Black Lung Captain, most notably). I was also surprised that the PR copy for Finch suggested that reading Cities of Saints and Madmen and Shriek: An Afterword first would be a good idea, so I might have to get hold of those as well.

Anyway, barring further big new releases arriving, that's a good six months' reading taken care of there. Will I catch up? Probably not. Expect this pile to have ballooned to even more epic proportions by this time next year.

Currently reading: Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay
Currently watching: Ashes to Ashes Season 3, Doctor Who Season 31, Firefly (rewatch), Lost Season 6
Currently playing: Third Age: Total War

Update

What I'm Reading
Whilst the Gaunt's Ghosts novels are splendid fun, these sort of series can burn you out if you read nothing but them for weeks on end. For this reason I am taking a break to check out Dan Simmons' Drood and will probably follow that up with a full read-through of Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet (rereading the first two before finishing off the series). This may change if my review copy of Warriors shows up in the meantime.

Game of Thrones on HBO
News has been very thin for the last month or so, as HBO have viewed the pilot and been debating about whether to pick up the series or not behind resolutely closed doors. A final decision is expected sooner rather than later in March 2010 and it's still not clear which way they are going to jump, although the overall vibe has been very positive.

What I'm Watching
The final season of Lost, naturally, and the second season of Being Human.

General Status
As mentioned at the start of January, my blogging and read time has become more limited due to various (mostly positive) factors, such as a ramping up of job applications and interviews. As such a slower rate of posting is expected to continue in the meantime. Obviously keep an eye on my fellow bloggers (listed in the sidebar on the right of the screen) for the latest SF&F developments if I'm slow to catch up on them.

The All-For-Noughts

As many other bloggers have already done, I am marshaling my thoughts to pick the best SF&F books, films, TV series and computer games of the previous decade*.

Whilst I'll likely pick a 'PERSONAL BEST' choice for these things, the rest of the choices I'll leave unnumbered because the whole numbering thing provokes moaning, whilst leaving things unnumbered seems to provoke better general discussion. There'll be a number of categories, based on popular mediums, genres, or how much I've had to drink when I write them, and will appear in the near and nicely unspecified future :-)

* Specifically the 'Decade Popularly Known As The Noughts Even Though Technically It Isn't A Decade As Defined By Those Old Monks Because We Don't Have A Year 0 Even Though Jesus Wasn't 1 Year Old At Birth And What's Up With That, But Then It Should Be 2014 Anyway, So WTF?'', for clarity's sake.

Update

New Year's has been a fairly hectic and complicated period with lots going on, so not much time for blogging. It looks like this might continue for a while, so this might be a relatively quiet month entry-wise.

I'm still carrying out the Song of Ice and Fire re-read and expect a review of A Clash of Kings shortly. There are a number of film reviews I want to get to, and of course the big annual year preview. I also need to finish off the TV story arc articles, the final one of which is still forthcoming, hopefully soon!

Best wishes to everyone for the New Year.

Merry Christmas people!

Christmas Day again? Guess that means it's time for a big lunch, the Doctor Who Christmas special on the telly and a few mince pies once again.

I've been avoiding doing the 'Best of' lists for the year and decade so far, but I'll get onto those after Christmas, along with the final Arc-TV article and some more reviews. This has been a strong year for the blog, and hopefully 2010 will be even better!

Update

I'm a bit backed up on reviews at the moment, as I've been busy this week with a lot of job applications. Expect reviews of Terry Pratchett's Men at Arms and Soul Music shortly.


Currently reading: The Cardinal's Blades by Pierre Pevel
Currently playing: Icewind Dale (replay)

Update

Lots of rumours boiling around Sean Bean possibly being cast as Ned Stark in HBO's Game of Thrones. I'll withold a full blog entry until it is 100% confirmed though, which might not be until well into next week if HBO haven't released anything by now. Encouraging news anyway.

Put the Discworld reading on hold to read Songs of the Dying Earth. Normally with collections I review the stories as part of the over-review of the whole book, but this collection is massive, twenty-three stories, some of them pretty long. I might have to break the review into smaller chunks to make it easier to digest. I'll see how I go.

After an extremely long time I finally got back into The Witcher and hope to finish it before the end of the summer (only putting an hour or two into it a day). Nice to be playing a decent-sized RPG for once.

Updates

In an example of good timing, Patrick Tilley has just set up a new website and fan network here.

Meanwhile, China Mieville seems to have relaxed his Tolkien-sceptic stance in his old age and has written an article focusing on the 'cool stuff' in Middle-earth here. As he says, and it cannot be argued against too strongly, "Tolk gives good monster."

Currently Reading: Death-Bringer by Patrick Tilley
Currently Playing: Third Age: Total War, Company of Heroes
Currently Watching: Firefly (re-watch), Iran and the West (re-watch)